Consumers value word-of-mouth communications in large part because
customer reviews are more likely to include negative information about a
product or service than are communications originating from the
marketer. Despite the fact that negative information is frequently
valued by those receiving it, baldly declaring negative information may
come with social costs to both communicator and receiver. For this
reason, communicators sometimes soften pronouncements of bad news by
couching them in dispreferred markers, including phrases such as, "I'll
be honest," "God bless it," or "I don't want to be mean, but . . ." The
present work identified and tested in five experiments a phenomenon
termed the dispreferred marker effect, in which consumers evaluate
communicators who use dispreferred markers as more credible and likable
than communicators who assert the same information without dispreferred
markers. We further found that the dispreferred marker effect can spill
over to evaluations of the product being reviewed, increasing
willingness to pay and influencing evaluations of the credibility and
likability of the evaluated product's personality. [ABSTRACT FROM
AUTHOR]